


Parallels

by Axolotl7



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Feels, Fluff, Gen, Team as Family, mama may
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 12:55:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13502028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Axolotl7/pseuds/Axolotl7
Summary: Episode S05E09May will not have Daisy martyr herself out of some irrational belief that it helps save them. She will NOT.Cuddles ahoy!





	Parallels

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this all quickly this morning after watching the episode because it would not leave me alone! Apologies for any typos etc!

Thanks mom

 

It is wonderful to finally be able to fall in to her own bed at the end of what seems to have been an incredibly long week. The fact that she can let her head pillow upon his shoulder and that his arms come up around her immediately, holding her tightly to him, make everything even better. She could lie in his arms forever.

Disappointingly, he can seemingly never just let them lie comfortably in silence at the end of what is always a long day!

“You know…” he whispers into her hair and she’s waiting for some loving words to fall from his lips, something romantically sentimental that means they’re probably going to be busy making up for lost time rather than sleeping. “Daisy said something interesting to me earlier today?”

Or not.

She rolls her eyes and tilts her head up to look him in the face, eyebrows raised in question and more than a little annoyance.

“She said she didn’t want the inhibitor off.”

Hmmm. Well, that’s not entirely unexpected. Probably a sensible tactical decision actually. If Daisy’s powers destroy the world then neutralising them now, in this simple way that does not harm to Daisy-

“You think she’s going to destroy the world?”

Pfft! “Of course not.” She’s Daisy! She agonises over Fitz squashing a spider instead of turning it outside! Daisy would no more destroy the world than –

“I think Daisy needs to hear it,” he interrupts in that quiet and serous way he has of saying something profound. She can’t even argue that it’s his turn. Damn it.

“She’s probably gone to bed,” she justifies her intent to stay in bed, here where it’s nice and warm and she can snuggle tightly in to his arms, protected, and forget about the dangers of the world around them.

“You think she’ll be asleep?” Phil questions, but she knows full well it’s rhetorical. Daisy won’t be sleeping with this on her mind and now no longer can she. Damn it.

“You do realise they’re subordinate agents and not our kids, right?” she shoots back but still tosses the covers off her and starts moves from her comfortable hide. The fact that she tosses the covers off him as well is a little petty, but she’s feeling a little bit petty right now so that’s definitely okay.

“Of course, dear,” Phil responds simply gathering up the covers and rolling over feigning to go back to sleep. She snorts derisively and heads for the door, collecting her boots along the way.

Turns back. “Oh Philip?” she asks sweetly. Too sweetly.

There’s a mumble in to pillows that may or may not be an affirmative.

“Don’t ever call me ‘dear,’” she threatens him lowly. She is nobody’s ‘dear.’

She’s thankful that the Zephyr’s doors still close swiftly so she can pretend that she doesn’t hear his ‘yes dear’ in reply. She can enact revenge later. Daisy needs her right now.

 

The kids – the _other agents’_ \- rooms are just down the hall from their quarters so it doesn’t take long for her to end up outside of Daisy’s door. The journey certainly doesn’t give her enough time to come up with something to say. She starts with a knock.

The suddenly silence from the other side of the door speaks volumes.

“Daisy, it’s me.”

Still silence.

“Daisy, I know you’re awake.”

That finally garners a response from within. “It’s been a really long day, May, so I’m just going to try to get some sleep, yeah?” Daisy’s trying to be strong but she can hear the edge of tears in her voice.

“You can open this door or I can kick it down,” she sets out; those are the options. Daisy may as well know and choose wisely.

There’s still a few seconds hesitation before Daisy’s words come back through the door, followed by the almost silent footsteps of sock smothered feet on soft carpet. “Jeez, m- May! No need to go all hulk on me.”

“Less attitude,” she instructs simply after the door swings inward. She’s too tired herself to be dealing with Daisy’s faux teenage snark on top of everything else. She’d really rather be curled up next to Phil in her own bed.

“Sorry,” Daisy mumbles looking at the floor, her socked feet fidgeting in the carpet strands, belaying her preoccupation with other matters weighing so heavily upon her mind. Daisy’s small hunched over form looks so lost.

Her heart hurts just looking at the girl. She can feel her shoulders drop as she sighs. Tough love is not going to cut it this time. She heads the short distance to the unmade bed. Its twisted sheets tell tales of Daisy’s inability to set her mind at rest enough to sleep. She ignores Daisy hovering near the still wide open door as she slips off her boots, plumps the pillows up and straightens the covers enough to slide her legs in beneath them, sitting with her back up right against the headboard. Only once she’s comfortably settled with the clear intention of not leaving the room does she acknowledge Daisy again.

“So… erm… well I should really get some sleep so if you don’t mind-” Daisy starts off, clearly indicating the still open doorway as though there is any possibility that she’s just going to walk out and leave her in this state.

She rolls her eyes in answer. “Close the door, Daisy,” she instructs simply. After a few seconds indecision, Daisy does so. The door swinging steadily closed with a soft click confirming it has caught. The familiarity of it feels like home. No matter that the Zephyr has sat abandoned for ninety odd years, it still feels like home. She wonders if Daisy feels it too. “Come. Sit,” simple short instructions to Daisy seem to be the way to go.

Daisy moves towards her but perches indecisively on the edge of the bed, her hands clasped and shoulders hunched as though expecting a blow. She rolls her eyes and takes matters in to her own hands, pulling back the covers and leaning forwards to grab Daisy’s upper arm, ignoring her surprised squawk, and hauling her bodily sideways, Daisy’s legs scrambling to keep up, as she pretty much falls in a heap sideways in the bed. Daisy glares up at her from beneath dark hair and she has to think carefully to suppress the smile that wants to cross her face when looking down at Daisy’s sprawled, thoroughly rumpled form. She busies herself with shuffling Daisy’s legs straight and tittivating the covers over them both instead of reacting. Once sorted to her satisfaction she sits back against the headboard but Daisy is still just lying there, inches away and yet seemingly an insurmountable distance from her.

She snorts humourlessly then reaches down again to haul Daisy up and across the few inches necessary until Daisy is lying pushed closely in to her side, Daisy’s head held determinedly up off her chest for a mere few seconds before she concedes to the inevitable and slumps, and cuddles in to her. 

Daisy snorts in return, grumble mumbling to herself “If you wanted to cuddle, you could’ve just said” like this is something either of them are going to believe Daisy doesn’t desperately want right now. She ignores it in favour of focusing on more important things than dealing with Daisy’s attitude.

“Talk.”

Daisy hesitates. She waits her out.

“There’s nothing to talk about.” 

It’s an expected opening salvo she doesn’t bother to address.

“I’m just tired.”

Standard excuses she’s no intention of letting Daisy get away with. She waits several minutes for Daisy to speak again in to the intentional silence.

“I… Coulson told you, didn’t he?” Daisy accuses resigned. She neither confirms nor denies. She’s not here to let Daisy steer the conversation towards Coulson.

“It’s nothing really,” Daisy continues, looking anywhere but at her. Classic avoidance behaviour. “I… it’s just…” Here it comes. Finally. “If I destroy the world then maybe making sure I can’t do it, keeping my powers turned off with this inhibitor thing, maybe that’s a good decision, right?”

Wrong.

 

“After Bahrain,” she starts and she can feel Daisy tense at the mention, knows full well that Daisy won’t interrupt as she speaks about a time of her life that still remains so painful to recollect. “After Bahrain, I decided I never wanted to risk letting myself hurt anyone ever again. I refused to touch a gun, gave up practising hand to hand, removed myself from the mission roster and ran away, as far away as my heart could stand. 

“I decided that the only way I _wouldn’t_ hurt anyone was if I _couldn’t_.

“Even then, I pushed myself away from anyone, from _everyone_ I cared about just to be sure I wouldn’t hurt them too.”

“You wouldn’t-” Daisy tries to comfort her but she shushes her gently. She’s not sharing this for Daisy’s empathy. It’s Daisy’s understanding she needs.

“I didn’t know that. To my mind, it wasn’t worth the risk. 

“I toyed briefly with the idea of committing suicide… or of letting someone kill me on mission.” She can see the guilt lingering in Daisy’s eyes that says she’s hit this right on the money. Her heart freezes, terrified, but her mind and voice push on. “I knew that I couldn’t do that to those who loved me. My family, my friends…” Coulson “they wouldn’t have understood. They’d have felt guilty, have felt _responsible_ , for not doing more to stop me, even though they’d done more than enough to try to bring me back from the brink. I couldn’t cause them that pain simply to escape my perceived problems. It would be selfish. And irresponsible. And I would not do that to them.” She cannot emphasise this strongly enough. She will not have Daisy martyr herself out of some irrational belief that it helps save them. She will NOT.

“So I hid myself away, distanced myself so absolutely that I thought I’d never have to risk hurting any of them ever again.”

“The risk of me destroying the world –” Daisy agrees solemnly.

“Let me finish,” she chides her gently. “When Coulson needed my help… I ended up back out there, in the exact situation I had been so studiously trying to avoid for oh so many years. I couldn’t leave him to fight to save the world alone. All too soon there was fighting. But I justified it that I had to, to protect Coulson. The next mission there was more, we were so very outnumbered and I _had_ to take weapons. I had to aim guns with the intention to shoot to protect all of you. I screamed at Coulson after that mission because I couldn’t scream at myself!”

“You had to, to protect our team. If you hadn’t-” Daisy seemingly cannot help but interrupt.

“Exactly,” she finishes simply with a finality that hopefully shocks Daisy’s brain into seeing the clear parallels.

She lets it rest there.

Hopes that Daisy’s mind is working through the trails to understand that she can’t just cut off her powers out of fear of hurting those she cares about without also compromising her ability to protect those she loves.

“What if we need your powers to protect us, Daisy?” she prompts.

“I’m scared,” comes the quiet breath of voice.

“I was scared that I’d end up hurting those I loved,” she confesses in return.

“You’d never hurt us,” Daisy’s voice contains a certainty, a faith she’d probably never have in herself. 

“And you’d never destroy the world,” she says with equal certainty. It’s a faith both of them need to hear.

 

She lets that sit there for the minute. Let’s Daisy turn it around in her mind, over and again. Let’s her feel the weight of truth in every word of it.

“What if I do? What if I’m the one that destroys the world?” comes Daisy’s eventual question, her voice so quiet, so full of vulnerability that she wants nothing more than to wrap her up in safety and promise nothing can ever hurt her again.

“What if something else tries to destroy the world and we need you, with your powers, to save it?” she counters quickly. “What if its not having your powers that destroys the world?” 

Coulson’s been going through the possibilities and probabilities until he’s blue in the face and turned his mind to mush. They’ve no way to predict the future. No way to _know_ what decision prompts the ‘right’ consequences. There’s no point driving themselves mad trying to control the impossible! All that matters is the here and now. The decisions they’ll make for the right reasons based on the best information they have at the time. The future will make itself regardless.

In the here and now she’ll keep holding Daisy, leave her a safe space to think things through herself, give her the facts to let her make the ‘right’ decision. Whatever she decides that is.

“There’s no way to know,” Daisy eventually complains. “There’s no way to know what’s right!”

“Of course not!” May shuts her down, there’s no point complaining at the unfairness of the world. It’s not productive and it isn’t going to change anything. “So, suck it up, buttercup!” Damn, that felt good to say! “We don’t know what the future holds for any of us. All we know is that we’ll try to do right. We’ll make the decisions we believe are right at the time. We’ll try our damnedest to protect this little planet! 

“That’s a ‘we’ Daisy. Not me and Coulson but you and Fitzsimmons. The few people on our team that I trust absolutely to be right by my side at the end, still trying to do what they feel is right. Do you know how rare that is? To be able to trust absolutely that someone else will try to make the right decision to protect the planet, over and above whatever personal feelings they may have about a given situation. It comes down to this… I trust you, Daisy. I trust you to do what you believe is right. With or without your powers. But if you leave the inhibitor on then you take away that option. You take away your ability to choose whether you need to use your powers. 

“You lock away something we might need to save the world.”

Silence follows her statement. Not uncomfortable. Just contemplative.

Contemplative silence.

She sighs and lets her fingers stroke Daisy’s hair back from her forehead. It feels only natural when they continue carding through her hair gently. Daisy’s small sigh and the release of tension throughout her body says its soothing so she keeps doing it, slow soothing stokes calming Daisy’s mind.

“Okay,” Daisy whispers without moving from her place.

“Okay… what?”

“Okay, I’ll get the inhibitor removed.” Decision made, Daisy immediately relaxes. A weight of pressure suddenly off her mind. Daisy’s sudden smirk should cue her in to the joke coming at her expense, “I’ve never heard you talk so much by the way… or get so totally mushy…”

“Mushy?” she objects more because she feels she ought than out of any real concern. 

“Totally mushy. Smushy marsh mellow mushy. I-” 

“Come on, get up,” she interrupts rather than defend further how obviously not marsh mellow smushy she is! “I’ll come with you down to medical.”

“Awww…five more minutes?” Daisy pleads with frankly ridiculous puppy dog eyes, hugging her tighter and showing no inclination to move. Ridiculous puppy dog eyes to which she is apparently not immune. Maybe there’s also a little bit of her heart that sees the edge of desperation around the edges of Daisy’s eyes. Daisy needs the comforting touch of another human being right now more than her joking words would tell.

“Five minutes,” she agrees firmly. “But not one minute more, Daisy.”

Almost before she’s finished speaking, Daisy squirms in tighter to her chest and she can’t help but smile down at the young woman curled in her lap like a child trying to hide from the world. Her hands re-take their course stroking the girl’s long dark hair as she wonders anew at how perfect this feels just to hold and have her mere presence be of comfort.

Daisy sighs contentedly and mumbles in to her chest but she really can’t make out the words. “Hmmm?” she questions gently, not particularly concerned at whatever was said. It doesn’t really matter what Daisy might mumble. What matters is that she’s not hiding away from her potential out of fear that she might hurt someone.

Daisy rolls slightly to one side and looks up to meet her eyes, wariness written across her face. So, maybe it was something important.

“I said… thanks mom.”

She does not know how to react to that. Her mind is spinning in a whirl. Her heart feels like it is beating outside of her chest. Externally, she’s blinking too rapidly. Trying to hold back the sudden wet feeling, watering her eyeballs. Her face is probably frozen in shock. Daisy looks very slightly terrified. That’s what brings her priorities back in to order. Daisy can probably count on one hand the times she’s called someone ‘mom’ without facing rejection in her too short childhood. She swallows swiftly to clear the lump that has found its way into her throat.

“Five more minutes,” she says simply, pushing Daisy’s head to gently encourage her to curl upon her again, arms falling naturally to hold her. She’s unable to find any words appropriate to express how completely adrift she feels emotionally, and how very honoured. 

She can feel Daisy’s smirk as the girl snuggles further into her.

“Totally smushy… mom.” 

 

 

X


End file.
